Ukrainian strikes hit Russian servers

Multiple Ukrainian drone strikes over the last week have taken Russian data centers offline and reportedly caused online bot traffic to plummet significantly.

Charts show bot traffic decline

A chart citing Cloudflare data circulated on social media showing a sharp decline in bot traffic following attacks on Yandex servers, Russia's Google.

But these aren't disinformation bots

The chart actually measures requests from automated Yandex web crawlers used for search indexing and customer service, not the troll farms pushing disinformation.

“has nothing to do with social media”

Fake charts spread online

Other diagrams claiming to show Russian disinformation bot decline circulated, including one shared by European Parliament member Tomáš Zdechovský about the AfD party.

Computer scientist flags AI-generated image

Computer scientist Raphael Wimmer suspects the diagram is AI-generated, pointing out inconsistencies including a data point logged for October fifteenth, a future date.

Yandex services remain offline

The vast majority of Yandex-operated systems remain offline following the latest drone strike, including Yandex Pay, leaving users unable to transfer funds or make purchases.

“we can't yet give you a precise restoration timeline, but we promise: we won't stop until the service is restored”